Graphics Card. Looking for recommendations (1 Viewer)

[NorthernJohn]

I'm currently running through the motherboard graphics (ATi Radion Xpress 256MB. RAM hijacked from system memory) and see this as an obvious place to upgrade and hopefully see some benefits.

I'm not too hot on the deep techy side of things. I'm an IT professional so have an understanding but this is not my field so hopefully you guys can come up with some suggestions.

I don't play games on my htpc so that is not a requirement. It will need to be PCI-E to fit my mboard and I would prefer it to be fanless for quiet operation.

ATi? nVidia? Dunno. You tell me.

Budget approx. 70 GBP. Could stretch a bit further if you don't tell my wife :wink:

Cheers

 

[NorthernJohn]

Aah... after having my post moved to the correct forum (which I'd not noticed existed) I see this question is answered above in the sticky

:arrow: It appears nVidia 6600 is the way to go then. What's the difference between 6600GT and 6600LE? Apart from about £20! Couldn't make much sense of the nvidia website.

Will try harder next time :roll:

 

[Callifo]

The new ATI X1x00 seem to have some pretty nifty AVIVO features (some cases much more efficient that nvidia's purevideo), but not sure on the price over there. Otherwise a 6200 is always cheap....

 

[SiLenTYL]

the nVidia 6600GT does have some improvements over the 6600 ...

Advanced Temporal De-interlacing ...

however im not sure if the 6600GT series has a silent fan/heatsink...whereas the 6600 does

after buying the 6600 i was happy with the performance and quietness, that it doesnt much bother me anymore, however if there is a 6600GT with a heatsink instead of a fan, then i would buy that for my MP htpc and shuffle the 6600 to my other PC

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

Hi John

Nvidia 6600 goes for my vote something about a native mpeg2 onboard chip for video work. About the difference between GT and non GT cards about 30% faster only really usefull for playing games, which we do (god if you could here the blood curdling screams from doom3, Prince of Persia, Sims2 Etc).
Yep mines the full blown family pc one day i may build a dedicated HTPC but for now this is IT.

8)

 

[Commodore 64]

In the USA, you need the extra memory bandwidth of the 6600GT to deinterlace ATSC (Digital TV, HDTV). I do not know how that affects others, but Microsoft suggests not less than 10GB/sec and as far as I can tell, they aren't exaggerating.